Your blood carries rivers
Multitudes
From wells of human understanding
Every pump of your heart sends them
Racing through you:
The Cherokee whose Trail of Tears
Left her open to love with the enemy
The Purépecha, bronze and quiet,
Their flat noses forcing your abuelo’s family
To concede that, perhaps, some of their children
Might like to tilt their jug of water
into masa for tortillas de maíz
Instead of pillowy dough for White bread
Amama, who was carried in darkness
Away from her home over the sea, where the blood
Of a thousand years of the fierce Euskalduna
Continued to circulate in her confused veins
Tata abuelo who put his body between
A bullet and the Revolution
After the government gave his farm
Back to the People.
Stream trickling through the mill wheelhouse
Empty of sugar
Further back, Spaniards, but first Jews,
Scattering like drops of anointed oil
When the water of the washbasin hit them.
One more incarnation of the Oldest Story
And closer, waves crashing into each other
Mixing spray and salt and bits of ocean treasure
Broken down until you cannot tell what it was
When it entered the dark depths
Hungarians looking for the promise of a land of
Immigrants, open for the taking.
Germans and English and Scottish and Italian
Swiss and Basque and who knows
I wonder if I dilute you
A mother of muddied waters
A confluence of streams
That spring from unknown underground sources
Skin of a thousand pigments
Eyes that changed from brown to green
Even the windows to my soul
Prone to shifting with the tides
Who are you, who can claim
Multitudes
Molecules from everyplace making rivulets
That rush through you
Where is Home for the River?